10x Traffic by going global with SEO: The Medicai + Ahrefs Success story

Medicai used Ahrefs to accelerate their organic traffic against their competitors using a combination of programmatic and content-based strategies.

Get an account for Ahrefs. Everyday once you wake up, open it and check it while you drink your morning coffee. Look into the keywords you rank for, and then what your competition ranks for. Then do the same with backlinks. These consistent actions will give you ideas that you can implement to improve your SEO. If you do this for a couple of months, it is impossible not to see incredible results. 

About Medicai

Medicai is a VC-backed healthcare startup that develops cloud-based infrastructure for medical professionals and organizations to securely share medical imaging with their patients. Their main customers are doctors, hospitals and clinics in the US and EU.

Medicai was in its early days of its founding, and was finding limited success growing their customer base. They operate in a narrow, traditional niche and fight against long-standing incumbent providers. As a small team, it was difficult to find the right customers and establish trust with hospitals, clinics and medical professionals at scale. Medicai quickly realized they needed to go beyond traditional methods that have worked for their already established competitors.

Andrei approached a friend who was an SEO expert, and one of his first recommendations was to get a subscription for Ahrefs. Medicai used Ahrefs to begin their journey with SEO as their go-to-market for building a brand and finding their customers at scale. 

“We did our research and realized that none of our competitors owned the digital space, especially SEO. We researched all the related keywords, taking into account different search intents to lay out multiple SEO strategies. From keywords with clear qualifying/BOFU intent such as ‘medical imaging data storage’,  to free online tools such as ‘free online CT viewer’, ‘free online X-ray viewer’ etc. We saw in Ahrefs that volumes are good and KD is really low. This informed us on how we could do on-page optimization to our own pages.“

SERP Overview helped them identify their competitors, and what it takes to beat them

SERP Overview helped to surface the pages that ranked at the top consistently across all their target keywords, in multiple locations. They studied these top competing pages, improved on what they did well, and added features that were lacking. With time and effort, Medicai’s pages started to rank and traffic grew quickly. Today, 20% of their leads now come from these free tools.

“When rankings came higher (even if traffic has not come yet), it was a good performance indicator that we were on the right track. Share of voice as an important metric to measure relative performance against the market. We could estimate and measure their efforts and then plan ours.”

“In the early days, we were only visible in Romania. After doing our SEO research, we soon realised we could address the global market, especially while analysing our competitors using Ahrefs.”

Medicai then began to localize their website into multiple languages. Using Keywords Explorer, they were able to identify the easiest languages to begin with. As they localized their pages language by language, Site Audit became instrumental to ensuring each of their localized versions were properly linked internally.

“We use Site Audit all the time when we do major changes to the website. We are especially careful for 404, 5xx errors and hreflangs errors. For example, right now, we just launched a new language (German) and after addressing a couple of errors we managed to improve our rankings.”

Ahrefs provided confidence to expand the team, target competitive keywords more aggressively. And each additional external hire’s performance can be monitored via Portfolios. ROI for going in on SEO became measurable.

“The biggest problem before doing marketing in-house was that the agencies we worked with would only provide us with cost information and little to no information about the potential outcome. So, it always felt like marketing was a gamble, which should not be the case.

With Ahrefs, and the information you provide, you are de-risking our hiring. We can now estimate quite well what are reasonable expectations for certain initiatives (translate to a new language) and make decisions more confidently. “

At Ahrefs Evolve, Medicai connected with fellow marketers and found fresh strategies for growth

One of the ideas that Andrei and his team got from Ahrefs Evolve conference was to create programmatic pages for their customers to easily contact their patients and receive medical files. In turn, this allowed Medicai to significantly expand their target keywords and gain traffic from long-tail keywords that are still relevant to their target audience. 

“At the Ahrefs Evolve conference, I realized that the people behind the tool are very close to our way of thinking, driven to constantly deliver value and eager to share what they have learned so far. Our interactions with the Ahrefs team and conference participants gave us so many great ideas, which we implemented with tangible results.”